Exercise eight: Illusions!

Posted on Happy Minds!

"If you can solve your problem, then what is the need of worrying? If you cannot solve it, then what is the use of worrying?" - Shantideva



Try to realise that the Now is sharp as a needle. It is infinitely small. There’s no beginning and no end to the Now. You could say: the past is the beginning of the Now, and the future is the End of the Now. But both the past and the future do not exist in the Now. If either or both of them would exist in the Now, there would be innumerable copies of everything; your body as it was a split second ago, and your body as it is Now. One can easily verify that this is not the case. Therefore, it is quite safe to conclude that the past and the future do not exist; only the Now exists. So, how can anything that does not exist be the beginning of anything? And how can something that does not exist be the end of anything? Let alone be the beginning or the end of Reality itself?

So, in conclusion, the Now does not have a beginning, nor does it have an end. It just IS. However, it is senseless to say that it is, because you can only say that something IS, if it has permanent qualities. And the Now does not have any permanent qualities. It continuously ceases to be. That also holds up for everything that is in the Now. The you of a split second ago just died!
The now is continually renewed. We perceive that as time. But in fact, time is a concept of the mind. Time does not exist in the Now. Because if time was to exist in the Now, the past and the future would also have to be real entities, which they are not. Past and future are entities made up by the mind.
The mind only exists, based on the concept of time. All assumptions of the mind are based on the basic concept of a past and future that exist in Reality. However, that basic concept is false, it is only an illusion. Therefore, the mind is an illusion itself.
If the mind is an illusion, all concepts held by the mind are illusions! So suffering and happiness are completely illusionary! So, why worry?